Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Reince Priebus: Trump accepts that “entities in Russia” were responsible for the DNC and Podesta hackings

I can’t tell yet if this is a new spin strategy carefully scripted by Team Trump or if Reince is about to get an angry phone call from his boss. Trump’s argument, after all, has been that there’s no way to tell who’s behind a hack. “Entities in Russia” puts the culprits a lot closer to Moscow than the proverbial “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”

VIDEO: listen to Priebus above

The phrasing is noteworthy. Reince does answer “Russia” at one point when Wallace badgers him to name who Trump thinks is behind the hackings, but during the rest of the interview he uses the phrase “entities in Russia,” which feels deliberately ambiguous. “Entities” could refer to private hackers acting on their own initiative, not at the behest of the Russian government. This may be Team Trump trying to find a middle way between accepting the new intelligence report and sticking with their talking point that we can’t know with absolute certainty that Putin’s behind this. Okay, they now seem to be saying, we accept that it was someone in Russia who did the hacking and handed the material off to Wikileaks, but as to whether they were following orders from the Kremlin, hmmm.

For the record, this is what the report released on Friday had to say about that: ...